A humorous and educational look at speech pathology.

EDIT: It looks like this page is a destination for a lot of visitors who are coming here from one of the posts in the series, so I’m going to be listing a table of contents of sorts with links to the posts that are currently up:

Yesterday, Out of the Box Games asked on their Twitter feed and Facebook page about friends and followers who had invented games. I mentioned a couple I was working on, and offhandedly mentioned that I was also modifying existing games for speech therapy. This sparked interest from the company’s social media manager, and following some comments back and forth, I realized that I had the makings of a blog post – many SLPs use board games in their practices, and I consider my go-to board game bag list to be just as essential as my iPad app list when doing treatment. After a couple unsuccessful drafts, I realized that what I really had was a series of blog posts, each addressing a different game. As such, each week, you’ll see a post on this space discussing a particular board game’s utility in speech and language treatment addressing the following topics (and, for those of you in the board game community, this may lead to a BoardGameGeek GeekList as well):

Variants/Expansions: If the game has a variant version (like a “Junior” or “Kids” version) or any expansions, these are listed here.General Overview: A discussion of the game’s theme, mechanics, and play.Skill Support: A list of speech and language skills (or related skills) the game can be used to support.Strengths: Areas in which the game is effective in therapy with no changes to the rules or mechanics.Challenges: Challenges that exist to using the game, with no changes to rules or mechanics, in therapy.Accommodations/Modifications: Ways to modify the game rules and mechanics to make the game more conducive to speech therapy.Alternate Uses: Ways to use the game’s components as speech therapy materials outside the game’s rules and mechanics entirely.

I’ve already got a list of ten games or so that I plan on reviewing, but if you have a particular game you’d like me to talk about, let me know in the comments – I’ll look into picking it up or, if I already have it, move it up the list.

[…] I actually have an obfuscated objective! For those of you who have been following the board game posts but haven’t looked at the rest of the blog, I initially set out to create a blog to present […]